Five Days Left To Help Us Make One Billion Users, The Social Media Card Game

Techdirt

from the home-stretch dept

If you’ve been following the Kickstarter campaign for our new card game, One Billion Users, then you know we’re not quite on track on to hit our goal — but we haven’t given up! We’ve now passed the halfway mark in funds raised, and we’re doing everything we can to make a final push before the campaign this week. So if you’ve been hesitating, now is the time! Please head on over to Kickstarter and become a backer to secure your copy of this fast, fun, competitive cared game about building the biggest and best social network.

For those who have already backed the campaign, don’t give up hope! Tell your friends, spread it around, and keep your fingers crossed — we really want to get this game out into the world, and we’ll be working hard to drum up support here on the home stretch. Also, in case you missed it, we’ve also added a new tier for superbackers who want to give us some extra support.

We do have other plans if the campaign fails to hit its goal this time around (we won’t be giving up!) but for now we’re focused on these remaining five days. Thanks again to everyone who has already contributed, and with a little luck you’ll soon be able to play One Billion Users.

Filed Under: card game, games, gaming, one billion users

Appeals Court Declares Injunction Against Ohio’s Blocking Of Immunity-Stripping Bill Moot Because It Dicked Around Long Enough To Make It Moot

Legal Issues

from the doing-the-overlord's-work dept

Those of you who still believe the nation’s courts are capable of handling the constitutionally-guaranteed redress of grievances, prepare to be disabused of those notions. While the courts may occasionally care about rights, they’re far more willing to protect the government status quo than allow mere citizens to upset the status quo apple cart.

We’ve seen this in the Fifth Circuit, where judges originally agreed (very strongly) that arresting a journalist for publishing information obtained from a law enforcement officer violated that person’s First Amendment. The solid judicial smackdown of the government’s overreach was followed shortly thereafter by a petition by (unnamed) Fifth Circuit judges for a rehearing. Following that rehearing, the Fifth went entirely in the other direction, insisting that what was — only months earlier — determined to be a flagrant violation of rights was now entirely constitutional.

That’s what has now happened in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. An Ohio ballot measure that would have stripped local government officials of absolute immunity was denied no less than eight times by Ohio Attorney General David Yost. The ballot measure got the signatures it needed to be added to ballots, but AG Yost rejected it repeatedly. Yost moved the goalposts with each filing, refusing to provide the applicants with any guidance as to how they could bring this ballot measure into compliance with constantly shifting guidelines.

Those seeking to put the measure on the ballot filed a federal lawsuit on March 27, 2024. The lower court — recognizing time was of the essence — issued its decision less than two months later. While it did deny the injunction request, it did rule the plaintiffs could move forward with discovery. Facing this latent threat to his ability to act vindictively when presented with ballot measures he didn’t personally like, AG David Yost asked the Sixth Circuit to take a look at the case before he was forced to turn over information to the plaintiffs.

The Sixth Circuit, recognizing time was of the essence, issued its own ruling less than two weeks after AG Yost’s appeal. Unfortunately for the Attorney General, the Sixth Circuit not only found in favor of the plaintiffs, but also issued a preliminary injunction barring the AG from continuing to interfere with this ballot measure.

At that point (May 29, 2024), there still may have been enough time for the plaintiffs to gather the 400,000 signatures needed to place this ballot measure on the November 2024 election ballot.

For reasons that are now immediately apparent, the worst judges in the Sixth Circuit decided this question needed to be heard by the full court. This request for an en banc hearing was granted and the Sixth Circuit issued an opinion nullifying its original decision, which had firmly found in favor of the plaintiffs.

Until this point, everything had been expedited. The original lawsuit was reviewed and received a ruling within 60 days. The interlocutory appeal by the state AG was handled within a month of the notice of appeal. The agreement to hear the case en banc was issued within two weeks of the first notice of internal Sixth Circuit disagreement.

And then… nothing happened for another five months. The en banc hearing didn’t happen until two weeks before the November 2024 elections. (The case was heard on October 30. The elections occurred on November 5.) The opinion wasn’t issued until 16 days after the national election had been called.

It is what it looks like: the en banc request was made by judges upset that regular people might be able to negate state-level immunity protections via ballot measure. So, the request for rehearing was made immediately, and then the court dragged its feet for nearly another six months. While the re-hearing occurred before the election (by two weeks), it wouldn’t have mattered. Even if the court had sided with the plaintiffs, it would only have given those pushing the ballot measure about 14 days to secure the 400,000 signatures needed to ensure placement on the ballot during the November elections.

But it pushed off the decision until two weeks after the election, presumably for the sole reason of declaring the lawsuit moot… even if its mootness was entirely dependent on the bullshittery of the judges asking for a full rehearing and the minority judges’ cowardly unwillingness to handle this with the same alacrity they had used to respond to the Ohio AG’s appeal. Instead of justice, we just get several judges screwing around long enough the chance to put this issue on the November 2024 ballot was nonexistent.

Now that there was no danger of accidentally allowing citizens to pursue lawsuits against Ohio government employees without being stymied by ridiculous declarations of immunity, the Sixth Circuit (en toto) is finally willing to issue its decision [PDF]. And that decision says: hey, we fiddled while metaphorical Rome burned but since Rome is burnt, there’s nothing compelling us to find in favor of the people who wanted to see this court act before Rome was burnt to the ground.

Now that the November 2024 election is over, her request for relief, like many a 2024 election yard sign, has become stale. Ordering Yost to certify that summary now will not give Brown the relief she seeks because the window to appear on the 2024 ballot has closed. Without power to rewind the clock, we cannot give Brown the relief she sought in her preliminary injunction. Given the “nature of the relief sought,” the matter is “moot because the . . . election is over.” Brockington v. Rhodes, 396 U.S. 41, 43 (1969) (per curiam).

Now, I realize this site draws an audience that is a cross-section of the general public and we’re not expecting people to have completed a year of two of law school before reporting posts like this one. But there’s only one legal term of art that can be used to describe this: pure cuntishness.

The judges who demanded the rehearing made sure the case couldn’t be decided in time to provide relief to the ballot measure proponents who had spent the previous several months being screwed with by a state official who never had any intention of ever approving this ballot measure. And now that the (new) majority had managed to make this a non-issue, it now has the gall to proclaim it is powerless to “rewind the clock.” And with that statement, it pretends the en banc hearing supporters did not deliberately allow the clock to run solely for the reason of denying relief to the people trying to curtail government immunity.

The dissenting opinion nails it, though. Even if the majority wants to pretend it didn’t engage in a performative re-hearing (at the last minute! five months[!] after the case was first handled and, as the dissent points out, only six days before the election), it doesn’t get to pretend issuing an injunction is no longer an option. After all, elections and ballot measures are an ongoing process. Denying relief now just means this lawsuit will be showing up in court less than two years from now, when the next state ballot measures are being considered. Even if it’s “moot” in terms of an election date that has come and gone, an injunction is needed to ensure Ohio AG Yost doesn’t just pull the same shit the next time around.

Yost has rejected Plaintiffs’ summaries time and time again, for reasons that appear increasingly specious. Meanwhile, Plaintiffs have been unable even to begin circulating their petition. Because Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction is not moot and because they are likely to succeed on the merits of that motion, I would grant relief.

Unfortunately, it’s the majority that has the final say. Everything goes back to square one. The plaintiffs can restart the ballot measure petition process, assured that the same amount of AG bullshit will greet their efforts this time around, only with another layer of vindictiveness added to it. The AG has been told he can fuck these petitioners over repeatedly without fearing any reprisal from federal courts. And so he undoubtedly will, especially when absolute and qualified immunity are on the line. The Sixth Circuit has deliberately abdicated its responsibility to the public by running the clock for the sole purpose of disposing of a lawsuit attempting to salvage a ballot measure only government employees would object to. This is circling the wagons, but at the appellate level. And the moment enough judges recognized the latent threat to government autonomy the proposed ballot measure presented, they ran out the clock to prevent citizens from empowering themselves and/or seeking actual redress through the court system.

Filed Under: 14th amendment, 1st amendment, 6th circuit, absolute immunity, ballot measure, David yost, qualified immunity

Florida Sheriff’s Office Agrees To End ‘Predictive Policing’ Program That Targeted Students And Their Families

Legal Issues

from the crime-fighting-dot-xls dept

The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in Florida thinks (or, at least, thought) it could make a dent in crime by engaging in “broken windows policing” by way of an Excel spreadsheet. I wish I was making this up but I’m absolutely not. The end result of this ad hoc “predictive policing” program was… well… predictable.

First the Sheriff’s Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts.

Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.

They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.

One former deputy described the directive like this: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”

The next end result was equally predictable: the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office got sued. The Institute for Justice, representing multiple harassment victims, took the Sheriff to court over this so-called “predictive policing” program — one the Sheriff’s Office felt worked so well is should be expanded to “predict” which minors might be possible future criminal suspects. This one utilized an Excel spreadsheet overseen by [what fresh hell, etc.] “juvenile intelligence analysts.” Students were graded by deputies based on things they had done or things that had happened to them in order to determine exactly how much harassment officers should bring to bear against them and their families.

As was revealed earlier by another investigation, the Pasco County Sheriff’s other predictive policing program has led to months of harassment, with supposed “at-risk” residents being cited for un-mowed lawns, missing mailbox numbers, minors smoking on their property, and having chickens in their yard. When fines and fees aren’t paid, deputies start arresting people. Anyone flagged by the system can expect to be visited several times a month by deputies who apparently have way too much time on their hands.

The same harassment is in store for students the Pasco County Sheriff deems “at risk.” And it doesn’t take much to get on the list. According to the program’s documents, getting 1 “D” in a semester will flag a student as “at risk.” So will 3-4 absences in a quarter. Being a victim of a “personal crime” is also an at-risk factor.

Fortunately, this lo-fi version of “Minority Report” is now officially dead. As the Institute for Justice reports, it has secured a settlement from the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office — one that includes not only a payout, but a promise to terminate the program because of its contribution to years of civil rights violations.

In the settlement agreement, the Sheriff’s Office agreed that the program violated the Constitution in three separate ways: 

• First, the Sheriff admitted that the program violated the Fourth Amendment. Law enforcement has the “implied license” to knock on an innocent person’s door “just like any member of the public.” But, as the settlement agreement finds, “prolific offender checks were performed at the Plaintiffs’ residences that exceeded that implied license.”
• Second, the Sheriff admitted that the program violated the First Amendment, which protects people from being punished for their “intimate associations,” like with their family members. The prolific offender checks “directly and substantially interfered with the Plaintiffs’ right of intimate association.”
• Third, the Sheriff admitted that the program violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process because the prolific offender checks “interfered with Plaintiffs’ liberty interests.”

The settlement agreement includes a six-figure settlement for the plaintiffs, along with a promise that the Sheriff has ended the program and that it will never resume.

Unlike many settlements where the government keeps throwing other people’s money at plaintiffs until it can buy itself out of having to admit guilt, this settlement [PDF] contains statements from the sheriff’s office that explicitly agree the program violated constitutional rights. While it does contain some wiggle words stating the settlement should not be read as “acquiescence” to the allegations of the plaintiffs, the rest of it says otherwise: the main allegations have been admitted to and the sheriff has agreed to end the program.

Hopefully, this means it won’t be resurrected in the future if the sheriff’s office believes it has found a loophole it can exploit or simply an opportunity to restart its mass harassment program with a couple of boilerplate statements reminding officers to respect rights. But this is Florida, and local law enforcement is nearly as disrespectful of residents’ rights as the state legislature. My guess is that this story isn’t completely over quite yet.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, chris nocco, ferp, florida, pasco county sheriff, predictive policing, privacy laws

IP Slapstick: How Everyone From Funko To A Registrar Fucked Up And Briefly Took Down Itch.io

Content Moderation

from the phishy-business dept

There are lots of ways for an individual person or entity to err when it comes to intellectual property enforcement such that it negatively impacts a website or business. But if you want to get really frustrated, what you need is several entities demonstrating complete incompetence in how they do business and making a victim out of an innocent website. That’s how you get a situation where Itch.io, famed indie video game platform, was taken down for several hours.

This story starts, as all good stories do, with a pop-culture collectables company utilizing an AI-driven brand-protection partner that managed to send a takedown report to a registrar accusing the site of the wrong infraction. Funko, the makers of those cutesy figurines from all corners of nerd culture, partnered with BrandShield. BrandShield’s AI-powered web-crawler took note of a fan page on Itch.io for Funko Fusion, a very real game from Funko. The page even linked back to the game’s official website and included some screenshots of the game.

Now, while that seems quite unworthy of any sort of takedown notice whatsoever, BrandShield managed to somehow report that page for “fraud and phishing” for reasons I can neither get out of any of the reporting nor speculate using my own wetware. Itch.io took down the supposedly offending page quickly in any case, and notified its registrar it had done so, but that notification appears to have gone entirely ignored. And, either because the offense listed was “fraud and phishing,” or because the registrar is plainly incompetent, that registrar disabled the domain entirely instead of taking action against the singular page.

In a Hacker News comment, Itch.io founder Leaf “Leafo” Cohran said that the BrandShield complaint seems to have originated from a single itch.io user who “made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game.” That led to independent reports to Itch’s host and registrar of “fraud and phishing” a few days ago.

While Cochran says the offending page was taken down immediately after the complaints were filed, he suspects the initial complaint meant “our registrar’s automated system likely kicked to disable the domain since no one read our confirmation of removal.”

The itch.io domain was back up and running by 7 am Eastern, according to media reports, “after the registrant finally responded to our notice and took appropriate action to resolve the issue.” Users could access the site throughout if they typed the itch.io IP address into their web browser directly.

Now, Funko reached out quickly to Itch.io wanting to work with them to get this corrected. It also commented that BrandShield didn’t request the entire domain be taken down, only the offending page. But that doesn’t offer any insight as to why the request cited “fraud and phishing” as the offense here. Neither appear to be applicable in any way. And perhaps that contributed to the registrar taking the entire domain down. BrandShield attempted to do some damage control on ExTwitter after all of this, but the community notes appended to its tweets are damning.

As for that registrar, iwantmyname, the simple fact is that the domain was taken down despite Itch.io taking the action requested in the notice. And that’s despite the notion that the page may not have been problematic in any actual way. So, to summarize, Funko’s partner BrandShield sent in a request to takedown an Itch.io page to the Registrar, iwantmyname, but marked it as being used for “fraud and phishing” rather than for copyright or trademark infringement, Itch.io fully and quickly complied with the request to remove the page, and the registrar took down the entire domain anyway. The incompetence alongside the purity of Itch.io’s victimhood in all of this is so stunning it’s nearly dizzying.

But, and I cannot believe I’m saying this, there’s the potential that this might get even more crazy.

Then, the story gets even more ridiculous. In another post that has yet to reveal itself as a silly gag, Itch.io claims that someone at Funko called their mother.

“This is not a joke, Funko just called my mom,” states the Itch.io X account. What follows is a mobile phone screenshot of a text message. “Got a strange call from a company about accusatory statements on your social media account. Call me.”

Just like the writer over at Vice, I keep going back to Itch.io’s Twitter account expecting to see that this was just a joke. But that admission still hasn’t come. Nor has any denial come from Funko itself and there is absolutely zero chance the company isn’t aware of the accusation.

While attempting to extinguish concerns over the Itch.io takedown, Funko did not address the suspicious tattletale who seemingly called the Itch.io representative’s mother. Until specified otherwise, I just have to believe it’s true.

I guess the only remaining question is, now that the site is back up, how will Funko, BrandShield, or iwantmyname victimize the site next? Is a call to the dean’s office warranted? Maybe something on the permanent record?

Or will this trifecta of asininity simply ask Itch.io to go to bed without its cookies and chocolates?

Filed Under: brand protection, domain takedowns, takedowns
Companies: brandshield, funko, itch.io

Daily Deal: Curiosity Stream Standard Plan

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Whether you’re a science enthusiast, history buff, or technology geek, Curiosity Stream has something for everyone. Unleash the power of on-demand streaming that allows you to choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, and where you want to watch it. From the comfort of your living room to the remote corners of the globe, your favorite documentaries are just a click away. Discover a vast library of content with Curiosity Stream’s standard plan, spanning science, technology, history, nature, and art. Delve into an array of engaging topics with breathtaking visuals and unparalleled storytelling. With new content added weekly, you’ll never run out of things to watch. It’s on sale for $159.97 until 12/15/24.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Blumenthal’s Blatant Hypocrisy: Praising Musk’s ‘Free Speech’ Support for Censorial KOSA Bill

Say That Again

from the oh-stop-it dept

There are few Senators quite as pathetic as Richard Blumenthal. He has a long history of an ignorant vendetta against tech companies (even pre-dating his time in the Senate), and he never ever bothers to actually understand the underlying policy issues or the implications of the legislation he passes.

In his latest cynical ploy, Blumenthal is praising Elon Musk as a “First Amendment champion” after Musk ignorantly endorsed Blumenthal’s censorial KOSA bill. It’s a transparent attempt to lend KOSA a veneer of free speech credibility it doesn’t deserve.

This is the same Blumenthal who admitted during a hearing that his FOSTA bill would kill smaller internet companies. When a witness explained that FOSTA would lead to bogus lawsuits against smaller companies (which it did), Blumenthal gleefully said he supported putting such companies out of business with his law. To this day, he has never admitted how much real world harm FOSTA has done. He has never reckoned with the fact that FOSTA increased (rather than decreased) sex trafficking. And he has scolded people in hearings who have suggested FOSTA has been a disaster.

He’s also the Senator who made a fool of himself by demanding that Meta “stop Finsta” even though it’s not a thing that Meta has control over. He demanded that Zoom use encryption, even while pushing another law, the EARN IT Act that he later admitted (after years denying it) was designed to outlaw encryption.

When people criticized EARN IT for being an attack on encryption, he dismissed them all as “big tech lobbyists,” even as there was a broad coalition of civil society folks and security experts, most of whom have no connection at all to “big tech.”

Basically, when Richard Blumenthal talks about tech policy, you know he’s lying.

But, apparently, for all of Richard Blumenthal’s hatred of tech companies (including ExTwitter, whom he’s attacked previously), the second that Elon (ignorantly) praises Blumenthal’s censorial, First Amendment violating KOSA, Blumenthal will go on TV and sing Musk’s praises as a “First Amendment champion.”

That’s Blumenthal on CNN saying:

“Elon Musk is the champion among big tech executives of First Amendment values and principles”

Of course, he’s saying this to make the blatantly false argument that KOSA doesn’t violate the First Amendment. Because, the thinking goes, if you believe that Elon is such a big First Amendment supporter, surely he wouldn’t support KOSA if it violated the First Amendment.

This is all cynical bullshit. Because Elon isn’t a First Amendment supporter. He has deeply censorial instincts that play out every day. He’s been abusing the courts to file vexatious censorial lawsuits against his critics.

But Blumenthal, the opportunist, is either a complete idiot or he knows this and doesn’t care. He knows that Elon Musk got rolled here and he’s trying to use it to his advantage to get KOSA passed, so ol’ Richard Blumenthal gets the headlines he wants about how he’s saving kids. And, as with FOSTA, he will never, ever admit to error should KOSA go into effect and all of the easily predictable harms to kids it creates start happening. He will never, ever admit how much LGBTQ+ content, how many resources to help those with depression, how many resources to help kids with eating disorders all gets taken down under KOSA.

He won’t admit that he was full of shit the first time ExTwitter gets sued under KOSA and Elon rages about how the law must be stopped.

Blumenthal’s cynical ploy here is transparent. He’s using Musk’s ill-informed endorsement of KOSA to lend the bill a veneer of free speech credibility it doesn’t deserve. But anyone who has followed Musk’s erratic actions at Twitter knows his commitment to free speech is paper-thin.

The real story is that Blumenthal is once again pushing misguided legislation that will do more harm than good, while refusing to acknowledge the inevitable collateral damage. His track record on tech policy speaks for itself — a string of bills he tries to push through with little regard for their real-world consequences.

KOSA is just the latest example. If it passes, it will almost certainly lead to over-censorship as platforms scramble to avoid liability. Marginalized communities and sensitive topics around mental health will likely be hit the hardest. But Blumenthal will declare victory, consequences be damned.

The irony is that Musk himself will likely end up raging against KOSA the moment it’s used against ExTwitter. But by then, the damage will be done. Blumenthal will have moved on to his next misguided crusade, leaving others to clean up the mess.

None of this is about actual kid safety. It’s not even about Elon Musk. It’s the same thing over and over again: what dangerous nonsense can Richard Blumenthal get passed to get his name in the headlines again, no matter how much harm it will actually do.

Filed Under: elon musk, free speech, kosa, richard blumenthal
Companies: twitter, x

AT&T Refuses To Upgrade Millions Of DSL Customers To Fiber Despite Untold Billions In Taxpayer Subsidies And Government Favors

Broadband

from the ill-communication dept

Four years years ago AT&T, a company that, for years, cheapened out on upgrading its broadband lines to fiber, effectively stopped selling DSL. While that’s understandable given the limitations of the dated copper-based tech, the problem is that thanks to concentrated telecom monopolization, many of these customers were left without any replacement options due to a lack of competition.

There are other issues at play too. AT&T has, for decades, received countless billions in tax cuts, subsidies, merger approvals, and regulatory favors (remember how killing net neutrality, broadband privacy rules, or approving a wave of doomed mergers were all supposed to unleash untold innovation, job creation, and fiber network expansion? Yeah, AT&T doesn’t either).

In many states, AT&T has managed to lobby lawmakers into removing any requirement that the company continue servicing these users, many of whom are elderly folks still using traditional landlines used for 911 access. That’s been easier in some states than others. It was caught bribing Illinois lawmakers to pass such “reform.” California’s also been resistant to letting AT&T off the hook.

Last week, AT&T more formally announced what was already clear: it stated it would not be upgrading tens of millions of copper-based phone and DSL customers to fiber. The numbers aren’t insignificant:

“AT&T’s wireline footprint has 88 million locations, said Susan Johnson, an AT&T executive VP in charge of supply chain and wireline transformation.

About 21 million of those have access only to voice service. The other 67 million are eligible for Internet access, and 29 million of those have access to fiber already. AT&T plans to boost its number of fiber locations to 45 million by the end of 2029 but says it isn’t profitable enough to build fiber to the other parts of its old landline phone and DSL networks.”

Again, when AT&T says it’s going to deploy fiber to 45 million people, you should always take those promises with a grain of salt. They’re experts at something I affectionately call “fiber to the press release.” AT&T insists that less affordable, more expensive, and more capacity-constrained satellite or wireless will have to be “good enough” for users left just out of reach.

It’s essential to note that AT&T has received untold billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks in exchange for near-Utopian promises of new fiber deployment. It received $42 billion alone from the last set of Trump tax cuts. It has spent untold millions of dollars lobbying to successfully defang the FCC and eliminate whatever’s left of consumer protections. It’s been accused of ripping off low income programs for the poor and rural school broadband projects.

Nobody’s ever done an audit of AT&T’s fraud, waste, and abuse because AT&T’s a trusted domestic surveillance partner effectively immune from meaningful government accountability. AT&T’s about to get a major chunk of the $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies included in the 2021 infrastructure bill.

Ars Technica kind of just floats over all of this as if it’s kind of an afterthought. The problem isn’t just that AT&T has refused to upgrade millions of locations despite already getting paid for it. It’s also been at the forefront of lobbying for state laws banning towns and cities from building their own affordable fiber networks, even in instances where AT&T refused to.

So superficially you’ll see people say things like “of course AT&T doesn’t want to spend money to upgrade aging lines to fiber, it’s expensive!” But they ignore a very long history of the company endlessly defrauding taxpayers, ripping off subsidy programs, and just generally taking untold billions of dollars for networks that routinely, mysteriously, wind up half completed.

Filed Under: deployment, digital divide, dsl, fiber, high speed internet, ma bell, subsidies, upgrades
Companies: at&t

Just Another Reminder That Undercover Cops Are Criminals Capable Of Ruining Innocent People’s Lives

Legal Issues

from the when-even-the-innocent-are-considered-expendable dept

Confidential informants (CI) are considered useful to law enforcement investigations, so society is just expected to bear the burden of criminal acts committed by informants in (dubious) furtherance of public safety goals.

CI’s are just criminals with more immunity than most — even when they happen to be some of the worst criminals imaginable.

In particular, in 2005, Quintana was convicted of Aggravated Battery Against a Household Member with a Deadly Weapon after battering his wife in front of his wife’s children, arming himself with a handgun and pressing it against his wife’s mouth, saying “I want to kill you, you fucking bitch.”

[…]

Within a month, Mr. Quintana began sexually abusing Jason Estrada’s minor son, JGE, who was then five years old. The abuse continued until February 20, 2013, when Mr. Quintana and his family moved out of the Estrada residence.

[…]

On April 3, 2013, Mr. Quintana and two other men travelled to the Estrada residence. In the presence of JGE, they beat and shot Jason Estrada, who died from his injuries.

That’s the story of one of the DEA’s informants — one who only “deactivated” after he’d already battered his wife, raped his son, and — with the assistance of two accomplices — beat and pumped bullets into his own child until he was dead. The only thing “deactivation” meant was that the DEA was going to stop paying Quintana and stop protecting him from prosecution. Nothing suggests the DEA felt anything other than slightly less strain on its checkbook following this string of horrific events.

What’s often ignored is that undercover officers can also engage in illegal activities without being treated like criminals. Obviously, the nature of job means undercover officers can’t obey all the laws without exposing themselves as cops. But officers working undercover or (more temporarily) engaging in stings seem to consider undercover work a useful excuse to engage in criminal acts.

But what’s often ignored is the other damage these officers do. Not only do they aid and abet criminal organizations while engaging in undercover investigations, but anything they do to maintain their cover is considered acceptable collateral damage. While society may — in general — obtain next to noting in terms of public safety gains, members of the same society these officers consider themselves to be saving are often the victims of cops granted an excessive amount of discretion and impunity.

This report from George Monbiot for The Guardian details the havoc wreaked by so-called “spy cops” (to use the UK parlance for undercover work). One long-term operative, who has received commendations for his “service,” used his undercover position to disrupt and harm the lives of innocent people he interacted with while performing this work.

Bob Lambert worked for the Metropolitan police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) in the 1980s and 1990s, first as an undercover cop infiltrating environmental and animal rights protests, then as operational controller of the squad, supervising other spy cops doing similar work. In the course of his undercover assignments, while posing as a radical activist called Bob Robinson, he deceived four unsuspecting women, innocent of any crime, into starting relationships. He stole his identity from a dead child.

With one of the women, Jacqui, he fathered a child. Two years later, he vanished. She discovered his true identity by chance more than 20 years later, and has yet to recover from the devastating shock. She says she feels “raped by the state”.

Lambert wasn’t the only “spy cop” to do this sort of thing, although he did at least advise other officers to “wear condoms” when starting up bogus relationships with people who weren’t even targets of ongoing investigations. As Monbiot puts it, UK law enforcement appears to tacitly approve of “state-sanctioned grooming operations,” so long as undercover officers occasionally produce a lead or two while not impregnating people they’ve lied to during the entirety of their relationships.

That’s terrible and is definitely something no law enforcement agency should condone. But so is this, for similar reasons, even if they don’t involve impregnating someone and abandoning them as soon as the investigation shifts focus.

We now know that Lambert and other police spies repeatedly lied in court when they were arraigned as “activists” on minor charges, using their fake names to maintain their cover. They withheld crucial evidence from the trials of genuine activists, whom they had stitched up: the courts were not informed of their role. As a result, many environmental campaigners have now had their convictions overturned.

Not only are these officers never disciplined, they’re actually rewarded for being so good at deception they’ve actively harmed innocent people who had the misfortune of trusting them.

None of the spy cops have suffered legal consequences, though activities such as identity theft and entering homes without a warrant are illegal. Their pensions remain intact, they have kept their medals and commendations. On Tuesday at the inquiry, Belinda Harvey, one of the women deceived into an 18-month relationship with Lambert, damned him as a “cruel and manipulative” liar. But the authorities see him differently. In 2008, Lambert received an MBE for services to the police.

Nothing will change because of this. But the reporting is still useful, even if the most it can do is highlight the perception gap between cops and civilians. Few regular people would consider these actions to be an acceptable way to engage in undercover investigations. And even fewer cops would agree with the majority of the public, which tends to believe this much power must be tied to a certain amount of responsibility.

But cops simply don’t care what the public thinks, even though they are literally “public servants.” Whatever keeps them loaded up with pensions, promotions, and citations is always considered acceptable behavior. As for the mothers left to care for the children left behind by undercover cops, the government at large appears to be just as unsympathetic. The innocent are acceptable offerings on the altar of law and order, as they always have been and are always expected to be.

Filed Under: Bob Lambert, metropolitan police, police misconduct, undercover officers

The Apocalypse That Wasn’t: AI Was Everywhere In 2024’s Elections, But Deepfakes And Misinformation Were Only Part Of The Picture

Overhype

from the hasn't-destroyed-society-yet dept

It’s been the biggest year for elections in human history: 2024 is a “super-cycle” year in which 3.7 billion eligible voters in 72 countries had the chance to go the polls. These are also the first AI elections, where many feared that deepfakes and artificial intelligence-generated misinformation would overwhelm the democratic processes. As 2024 draws to a close, it’s instructive to take stock of how democracy did.

In a Pew survey of Americans from earlier this fall, nearly eight times as many respondents expected AI to be used for mostly bad purposes in the 2024 election as those who thought it would be used mostly for good. There are real concerns and risks in using AI in electoral politics, but it definitely has not been all bad.

The dreaded “death of truth” has not materialized – at least, not due to AI. And candidates are eagerly adopting AI in many places where it can be constructive, if used responsibly. But because this all happens inside a campaign, and largely in secret, the public often doesn’t see all the details.

Connecting with voters

One of the most impressive and beneficial uses of AI is language translation, and campaigns have started using it widely. Local governments in Japan and California and prominent politicians, including India Prime Minister Narenda Modi and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, used AI to translate meetings and speeches to their diverse constituents.

Even when politicians themselves aren’t speaking through AI, their constituents might be using it to listen to them. Google rolled out free translation services for an additional 110 languages this summer, available to billions of people in real time through their smartphones.

Other candidates used AI’s conversational capabilities to connect with voters. U.S. politicians Asa Hutchinson, Dean Phillips and Francis Suarez deployed chatbots of themselves in their presidential primary campaigns. The fringe candidate Jason Palmer beat Joe Biden in the American Samoan primary, at least partly thanks to using AI-generated emails, texts, audio and video. Pakistan’s former prime minister, Imran Khan, used an AI clone of his voice to deliver speeches from prison.

Perhaps the most effective use of this technology was in Japan, where an obscure and independent Tokyo gubernatorial candidate, Takahiro Anno, used an AI avatar to respond to 8,600 questions from voters and managed to come in fifth among a highly competitive field of 56 candidates.‘

Nuts and bolts

AIs have been used in political fundraising as well. Companies like Quiller and Tech for Campaigns market AIs to help draft fundraising emails. Other AI systems help candidates target particular donors with personalized messages. It’s notoriously difficult to measure the impact of these kinds of tools, and political consultants are cagey about what really works, but there’s clearly interest in continuing to use these technologies in campaign fundraising.

Polling has been highly mathematical for decades, and pollsters are constantly incorporating new technologies into their processes. Techniques range from using AI to distill voter sentiment from social networking platforms – something known as “social listening” – to creating synthetic voters that can answer tens of thousands of questions. Whether these AI applications will result in more accurate polls and strategic insights for campaigns remains to be seen, but there is promising research motivated by the ever-increasing challenge of reaching real humans with surveys.

On the political organizing side, AI assistants are being used for such diverse purposes as helping craft political messages and strategy, generating ads, drafting speeches and helping coordinate canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts. In Argentina in 2023, both major presidential candidates used AI to develop campaign posters, videos and other materials.

In 2024, similar capabilities were almost certainly used in a variety of elections around the world. In the U.S., for example, a Georgia politician used AI to produce blog posts, campaign images and podcasts. Even standard productivity software suites like those from Adobe, Microsoft and Google now integrate AI features that are unavoidable – and perhaps very useful to campaigns. Other AI systems help advise candidates looking to run for higher office.

Fakes and counterfakes

And there was AI-created misinformation and propaganda, even though it was not as catastrophic as feared. Days before a Slovakian election in 2023, fake audio discussing election manipulation went viral. This kind of thing happened many times in 2024, but it’s unclear if any of it had any real effect.

In the U.S. presidential election, there was a lot of press after a robocall of a fake Joe Biden voice told New Hampshire voters not to vote in the Democratic primary, but that didn’t appear to make much of a difference in that vote. Similarly, AI-generated images from hurricane disaster areas didn’t seem to have much effect, and neither did a stream of AI-faked celebrity endorsements or viral deepfake images and videos misrepresenting candidates’ actions and seemingly designed to prey on their political weaknesses.

AI also played a role in protecting the information ecosystem. OpenAI used its own AI models to disrupt an Iranian foreign influence operation aimed at sowing division before the U.S. presidential election. While anyone can use AI tools today to generate convincing fake audio, images and text, and that capability is here to stay, tech platforms also use AI to automatically moderate content like hate speech and extremism. This is a positive use case, making content moderation more efficient and sparing humans from having to review the worst offenses, but there’s room for it to become more effective, more transparent and more equitable.

There is potential for AI models to be much more scalable and adaptable to more languages and countries than organizations of human moderators. But the implementations to date on platforms like Meta demonstrate that a lot more work needs to be done to make these systems fair and effective.

One thing that didn’t matter much in 2024 was corporate AI developers’ prohibitions on using their tools for politics. Despite market leader OpenAI’s emphasis on banning political uses and its use of AI to automatically reject a quarter-million requests to generate images of political candidates, the company’s enforcement has been ineffective and actual use is widespread.

The genie is loose

All of these trends – both good and bad – are likely to continue. As AI gets more powerful and capable, it is likely to infiltrate every aspect of politics. This will happen whether the AI’s performance is superhuman or suboptimal, whether it makes mistakes or not, and whether the balance of its use is positive or negative. All it takes is for one party, one campaign, one outside group, or even an individual to see an advantage in automation.

Bruce Schneier, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School and Nathan Sanders, Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Filed Under: ai, elections, generative ai, moral panic